Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  “He’s careful.”

  “He’s a dirty cop. He knows all the ways he can get caught.”

  Lakes gave me the number. I memorized it and said it back to him as I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and left it on the table. “Is this guy going to be ready to do business?” I said. “This guy is no use to me asleep.”

  “He’s awake. He’s always awake. This guy’s the hardest-working dirty cop I’d ever seen.”

  “Let’s hope he never goes clean on us.”

  “I got you a Honda Accord,” Lakes said.

  “What color?”

  “Red.”

  “Red’s hardly low-profile.”

  “Compared to the custom midnight-black paint and detail on the hundred-thousand-dollar sports coupe you’re flying around in now, this is a goddamn invisibility cloak.”

  “At what point did you stop calling me ‘sir’?”

  “About the time you stole my car.”

  I went back to where I parked the Bentley and took out a different cell phone without hanging up on Lakes. I pounded in the number Lakes had given me. It rang as I walked. The voice-mail message wasn’t personalized—just a generic prerecorded voice that said I should leave a message at the beep. I ended the call before the recording started. I put the other phone up to my ear and said to Lakes, “I rang your guy. How long am I going to have to wait for his text?”

  “It shouldn’t be long. He’s got to get to a computer.”

  “Right.”

  “Meet me at the diner. We’ll swap cars again.”

  “I might be a while,” I said. “I’ve got to go check out an apartment in the projects.”

  “Don’t let anybody steal my car.”

  I hung up.

  Two seconds later, my second phone beeped and I flipped it open. The sender’s number was restricted, and the message was eight capital letters with two dashes between them. I pressed the numbers that corresponded to the letters on the T9 pad, putting in zeroes for the dashes. The phone rang twice before it picked up.

  “Hello?” The voice was deep, slow, booming and robotic. He was using a voice changer.

  “I hear you have access to information,” I said.

  “This is correct.”

  “I’m looking into the theft of a Mazda Miata in Atlantic City. Unresolved case, reported missing sometime in the last two weeks.”

  There was silence for a bit, almost as if the line had gone dead, but it hadn’t. This was a product of the voice changer, I think. A voice changer shifts the tone of human-range sounds down by several octaves. Cheap ones also augment background noises, leading to indecipherable, alien-sounding static on the other end. Expensive voice changers, like this one, edit that out entirely and transmit dead silence.

  The voice on the other end said, “There are two hits.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A green 2009 Miata was reported stolen from Margate eight days ago and a white ’92 Miata yesterday from the Borgata downtown.”

  The second car wasn’t right. It was too old to match the tire tracks out at the airfield, and the date was wrong.

  “Tell me about the first one,” I said.

  “Mazda Miata, 2009, hunter green, New Jersey license plate Xray-Zulu-Victor-nine-three-Hotel. Reported missing from a parking space near Jerome Avenue Park eight days ago at eleven hundred hours. Last seen the previous night around midnight.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you delete the report?”

  “Done. The hard copy is still in the records, however, if they ever go looking. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, one more thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Can you give me the name of the guy who filed that report?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the voice said. “A guy named Harry Turner.”

  36

  Shit.

  Moreno and Ribbons had stolen one of the Wolf’s cars and used it for the heist. Why the hell would they do that? It made no sense to me. My mind raced for explanations, but nothing I could come up with worked. Were Moreno and Ribbons trying to throw off the police or something? If they were, it was a downright stupid plan. Did Marcus order them to do it? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t accomplish anything except pissing the Wolf off even further.

  Huh.

  I drove around aimlessly for a while to clear my head before starting off in the direction of Ribbons’s scatter. I chewed over the new information like it was a piece of gristle. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  I was lost in thought when I caught sight of a white Mercedes in my rearview mirror. The windows were tinted, but through the hot sunlight I could make out the faint silhouette of a single driver who kept his head abnormally low near the dash, and his hands at eleven and three on the wheel. I couldn’t make out his face, but then again I didn’t have to. I knew he was one of the Wolf’s men.

  That happened fast. I didn’t expect the Wolf to find me for another two hours. In a way, though, I was glad that his men had caught up with me again. As long as he kept sending people after me, I knew I was doing something right.

  I let the man follow me two cars back from one end of the city to the other. I went south. He went south. I turned left. He turned left. I made it easy for him. I drove slowly and signaled all of my turns. Once I reached the edge of the city I continued along the coast, turning down a thin two-lane road that wound through uninhabitable marshland punctuated with thin intercoastal waterways. Even though there were few other cars on the road, the white Mercedes still chose to follow me. After a few minutes we were in the middle of nowhere and the rest of the traffic had disappeared. It was just me and him. We were maybe five hundred feet apart now with nothing but the ocean beside us. I made it easy for him to see me and follow. I didn’t want to shake this tail. No.

  I wanted to ask a few questions.

  Of course this would’ve been a lot easier if I still had a gun, and even easier if it weren’t broad daylight and anybody out for a leisurely drive could see us. There were no other cars on this stretch of road, but at this time of day somebody could drive by at any minute. This was a problem. I had a plan, and that plan had certain requirements. If the plan went wrong, the last thing I wanted was for some good Samaritan to call 911 on me and for this whole deal to end with a police chase. Hell, even if the plan went perfectly, the trick I had in mind was pretty dangerous. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt. At least, nobody who didn’t have to.

  I looked at my watch. Quarter to 8 a.m. Good god. We’d been at this for almost an hour.

  I took my foot off the gas and let myself coast gently.

  The trick I had in mind was simple. Now that we were the only two cars on the road, if I were to suddenly come to a stop, say, because of an engine failure, the driver in the white Mercedes would have to make a choice. He would either have to keep going and drive past me, which would mean leaving me behind and possibly losing me, or stopping also, which would mean, out here in the middle of nowhere, that we’d have an encounter. One way or another, I was going to have a conversation with the driver of that car.

  I let myself drift along for a good minute or so. The road was smooth and flat. Once I was under ten miles per hour, though, I flicked the hazards on and pulled directly into the center of the road. I tapped the brake and came to a full stop. The engine ticked and cooled.

  I kept my eyes on the car behind me. The Mercedes faltered as it came around the bend and into full view. That was the moment of truth—the driver was making his choice to speed up or slow down. The Mercedes closed the distance between us and I watched it grow bigger in the mirrors. He definitely wasn’t going to stop. He swerved far out into the right lane to give me some room, but instead of slowing down he was speeding up. Once he was even with me, he honked his horn as if to say, Screw you, buddy.

  Then I stomped on the gas.

  A Bentley Continental has 560 metric horsepower, a twin turbo-charged engine and a top speed around two hundred miles an hour. Needless to say, when
I hit the gas, the car took off. I jacked the wheel as if I was going to ram him. The driver panicked. He jerked left to avoid getting hit and instead slammed into the left-lane guardrail facing the ocean. His car tottered on two wheels for a second before the metal finally gave out and the Mercedes careened off the edge. It flipped over once and splashed down into the surf.

  I pulled to a stop at the side of the road and got out.

  37

  KUALA LUMPUR

  The first few days after I killed Harrison were tough. Killing a cop is one of the worst things that can happen during a heist. Law enforcement has a knack for bringing cop killers to justice. They spare no expense. Homicides have high clearance rates, and homicides involving the police are even better. Those murders get solved. Period. Every criminal with half a brain knows this.

  Of course, we didn’t know for sure the guy I killed was a proper cop. Harrison was a white guy, which means he was less likely to be undercover for the Malaysian Royal Police, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t undercover for somebody or other. He could’ve been an Interpol agent, or paid informant, or even an FBI attaché. If he were any of those, we could be in just as much trouble. As soon as a body with a badge hits the dirt, the only smart thing to do is run and hide for as long as it takes.

  So that’s exactly what we did.

  We ran.

  The whole crew went radio silent less than four hours after the shooting. We were each allowed to keep one phone on in case Marcus called, but we couldn’t contact anyone else for any reason. There was a protocol we’d all agreed to follow in case something like this happened. We’d lie low in the city for six days. If Marcus contacted us about resuming the job, we’d do it. If Marcus didn’t contact us, however, we’d call the job a wash and get out of the country. For those six days, though, we needed to be completely off grid. We’d leave our scatters only for food and water, nothing else. No phone calls, no Internet, no shopping, no conversations. We’d talk to no one, write to no one and leave no trace of our existence. If you forgot to bring a razor into the scatter with you, you weren’t going to shave. We gathered in the Mandarin Oriental for the last time the afternoon right after the shooting. Even though it was daytime, it was raining by then and it felt like night. Alton Hill sat on a couch in the corner, filling his getaway backpack up with stacks of fifty-dollar bills. The rest of us stood around the video-conferencing table and discussed what we would do. There were a lot of sympathetic nods as I described the events out in the Highlands. We generally agreed that I had done the right thing, if a little rashly, so we’d keep an open mind about keeping to the plan. In six days we’d either be back to work planning this heist or halfway across the globe on separate jets, never to see one another again.

  When the meeting was over, it took me less than thirty seconds to collect my things and get out of the hotel. My gun was under the pillow and my bag was packed by the door. I slung the duffel over my shoulder and walked out without a second glance. Angela took the same elevator with me, and we watched as the floor numbers steadily counted down. I was nervous because we hadn’t been able to get in touch with Marcus. I couldn’t stop thinking about that story with the jar of nutmeg. Angela touched my hand. We looked at each other. Once the elevator reached the bottom we’d be strangers again, but for a moment we were simply ourselves. She smiled at me and said, “Does this bank job really mean that much to you?”

  “It means everything,” I said.

  “Then I’m with you,” she said. “I have your back, no matter what.”

  We didn’t have to say anything after that. The silence was all we needed. When we reached the lobby, the door chimed and opened.

  I went to my scatter the long way, by cab down Jalan Ampang all the way downtown to where it merges into Jalan Gereja. My room was in a small place behind a laundry with a hand-painted sign. When I got there I put my bag next to the door and my gun under my pillow, then sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the wall for what felt like an hour. I watched the sunlight drain away along it until the room was dark. I listened to water gather along the ridge of the showerhead until it formed a large drop and fell. My scatter was empty and plain and cheap and poor. It was everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. I closed my eyes and let myself sleep.

  A scatter is more than just a hiding place, you see. It’s where a guy gets his head right before the robbery. Everybody has a different approach. Some guys are so stressed they get sick beforehand. They’ll spend the whole night coughing and puking and swearing to god they’ll never pull another job, but when they wake up the next morning, all of a sudden they’re as calm as can be. Some guys try to work themselves into a frenzy. They spend the whole night thinking about their abusive dads or their unfaithful ex-wives or some other thing that gets them mad. That way when the job starts, they’re so angry they don’t care if they have to hurt someone to get what they want. Some guys fill whole notebooks with lists of stuff they’re going to buy, so their greed takes over. Some guys meditate. The result’s always the same. Everybody finds a way to deal with the fear, so when they show up on the job they’re ready to work. The scatter is as much a mental safeguard as it is a physical one.

  Over those six days I translated Ovid’s Ars Amatoria onto a yellow legal pad. When I was done I read my translation over a few times. It was forced and inelegant. I put my lighter to the corner of the notebook and watched as the fire consumed the words, then put the smoldering ashes in the wastebasket. My translations never flowed as well as I wanted them to. As hard as I tried, I could never make the words feel like my own. They lived only in the moment that I translated them, and died as soon as I put them on the page.

  I got a text message from Marcus on the sixth day. Just a setback, it said. Be ready to go on Friday.

  I remember feeling relieved. I was embarrassed about what had happened out there in the Genting Highlands, and to hear the heist was still on made me feel better about it. I’d done the right thing, I told myself. And I stand by that. Killing Harrison was the right thing to do.

  But that wasn’t my mistake.

  My mistake was failing to make sure he was dead.

  38

  ATLANTIC CITY

  The wrecked Mercedes wasn’t much to look at—just a pile of steaming metal with the roof battered a few feet into the surf. The rear wheels spun lazily in the air at awkward angles. If it weren’t for the sharp, acrid smell of motor oil and burned rubber, it would’ve been hard to tell how long the car had been there. It was already beginning to look like another feature of the beach. The thin strip of sand between the road and the surf was littered with massive rocks and other inhospitable detritus. Coke bottles. Cigarette packs. Plastic bags. The waves crashed up against the wrecked car and sent bits of white froth and sea trash flying.

  I put a hand over my eyes to block the glare off the ocean and took in the view, following the thin line of the horizon from the piers of the distant Boardwalk to the foggy shore farther north. Nobody had walked along this beach in a very long time. I could taste the salt from the ocean spray. If I wanted to, I could just drive off. If the driver didn’t come to, it might be days before somebody stumbled across this wreck.

  But the guy in the Mercedes did come to. And he started screaming.

  It wasn’t what you’d imagine, though. He didn’t have enough air for that. The sound he made was more like a desperate gurgle. Because the car had landed upside down, the man’s head was jammed into the surf and every new wave that came through flooded the interior. He was screaming because he couldn’t breathe. If I left him like that, he’d drown in a matter of minutes.

  I walked slowly down the hill and waded into the water. The driver’s door was stuck pretty bad, so I had to use my foot for leverage. I planted one foot firmly in the sand and tugged on the handle. The door came about halfway open before it got stuck in the sand.

  The man was barely conscious. He was strapped in upside down and his safety belt kept him from moving his head clea
r of the water. I reached over him through the door and unfastened the belt. He fell forward over the steering wheel and started flailing like a hooked fish. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled his head out of the water. Blood was running down his face from a cut in his left eye. Some glass had shattered and sliced him up pretty good. I think his ankle was broken, too, because it was wedged unnaturally between the accelerator and the foot well. I got a better grip and dragged him out through the surf onto the beach.

  That’s when I saw the gun.

  He had a 9mm Beretta with a silencer under his jacket. As soon as I let him go, he went for it. He brought his arm up in a wide arc and pulled on the butt protruding from his shoulder holster. He had a grip on it, but couldn’t pull the gun out. The six-inch silencer made it just a little too long and awkward to draw while lying on his back.

  I hit him with both fists in the solar plexus. His arms turned to jelly as he gasped and doubled over. The gun fell out then, but I kicked it away. He scrambled after it, so I stomped on his broken ankle.

  His scream was primal.

  I walked around him, picked up the Beretta out of the sand, pointed it near his face and fired off a round. The bullet made a sound like a whip crack and the gun made a low cha-chunk as the cocking slide opened the breach and ejected the spent brass.

  The man stopped fighting. He fell onto his back again, writhing in pain. He coughed and coughed until salt water and bloody spit bubbled out of his mouth and he could breathe again. He couldn’t speak, though. A shard of broken glass must have cut his tongue right down the center. I could see the frothy blood trickle from the corner of his mouth and up from his lips.