Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I looked left and right down the hallway. Opening a dead bolt using leverage is very loud. It would have been loud enough to draw attention from occupants of nearby rooms, but even if they heard they probably didn’t do anything. I could hear a television playing in the unit across the hall. Nobody calls the police anymore. They never help.

  I took out Grimaldi’s gun and checked the silencer, then pushed the door open slowly with my left foot. It swung open lazily on the hinge and made a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. I scanned the area before taking a step inside. I cleared the main room first, then the bathroom and the kitchen. There was no bedroom. The main room had a fold-out cot in front of an old color television. The vertical bars over the windows cast long shadows over the floor. I checked the closet and in the refrigerator.

  Nobody home.

  I put my gun away and closed the door.

  Ribbons had been fastidious. I’d expected his scatter to be a mess of old rolling papers, pizza boxes and empty beer cans, but instead it was as empty and clean as a prison cell. The walls were bare, and his clothes were packed in a small black Samsonite case on the floor. Sheets were clumped up at the bottom of the cot, and the trash was tied up in bags by the door. The whole place reeked of ammonia and Lysol, as if it had just been cleaned.

  I started going through his stuff. I pulled the sheets off the cot. I pulled the drawers out of the dresser. I shot through his kitchen. There was a hot plate next to the fridge and a single pan, spoon, fork and knife in the sink. There were two empty cans of chicken noodle soup in the trash. I checked each of the kitchen drawers. They were all empty. I did the bathroom next. Next to the sink was a box full of razor-blade cartridges, but no razor or shaving cream. In the shower was a single bar of soap, still in its wrapper. Under the sink was a bottle of cleaner and a couple of spare rolls of toilet paper. In the mirror, wedged between the glass and the frame, was a picture of an older black woman I assumed was Ribbons’s mother, and a real estate agent’s business card with some number written on it in blue ink. I took the card and flipped it over. On the back was written, Blue Victorian, Virginia.

  Drug users know all sorts of places to hide things. Headshops sell stash jars that look and feel like normal household products but contain secret compartments. I’ve seen shaving cream bottles that really produce shaving cream, but also have a false bottom for stashing cocaine. A motel room’s a goldmine. Behind the refrigerator. Under the vegetable crisper. In the toilet tank. Inside a ceiling light. I made an inventory and checked each spot. I worked my way back into the main room and took another look at Ribbons’s luggage. I didn’t bother trying to guess the combination on the zipper lock. I put the bag on the bed and pulled at the zipper until it tore free.

  Inside was a Colt .38 Saturday night–special revolver. It was an old model, matte-black, with a hammer spur filed down to a nub. They call this a “pillowcase gun.” The hammer spur has to be filed down like that so it doesn’t get caught on some pillow fabric, cock back and blow your brains out. The butt was wrapped twice over in duct tape. There was rust under the finish from years of neglect. The registration numbers were a distant memory. I checked the cylinders—six bullets—and dropped the old brass in the trash. Next to the pistol was a black cylinder as thick as a soda can and twice as long. It was heavy and had four large holes at the ends, three on one side and one on the other. I recognized it immediately.

  It was an Uzi suppressor.

  There’s no such thing as a silencer, in the literal sense. A gun always makes noise, because the expanding gases that drive the bullet break the sound barrier when it leaves the barrel. A suppressor cools and absorbs some of those gases so the shot isn’t quite so loud. Even a very good suppressor, though, doesn’t make that polite little spit it does in the movies—more like a whip crack or a phonebook falling on a cement floor. The purpose of a suppressor isn’t to take somebody down quietly. The purpose of a suppressor is to keep the shooter from going deaf when he uses it.

  Under the suppressor were various bits of clothing. One sweatshirt. One pair of sweatpants. One knit cap. One basketball jersey. One pair of faded sneakers. Two pairs of jeans. I closed the bag and took another look around the room. No phone. No computer. No cash. No bag for personals. I checked the pockets of his clothes and all of them were empty.

  Ribbons truly respected the scatter.

  He hadn’t been living here long, though. Even lifetime criminals hang movie posters on the walls and keep spare toothbrushes in a cup next to the sink. Ribbons hadn’t even taken his clothes out of his suitcase. He’d left them there beside the bed, still folded, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

  His place looked pretty much like mine.

  I took out the cell phone in my pocket and pounded in a few numbers. I pressed the green button but the call didn’t even ring. It just gave me the quick-paced disconnected symbol. I checked to make sure I had the number right. His realtor didn’t want to be reached, clearly. I was about to put the phone away when a thought struck me.

  It’s hard to describe it. One moment I was walking out the door of Ribbons’s scatter with nothing, and the next moment there was a slide-show of things I’d seen playing in my head. Little pieces of information popped up and then disappeared so fast I could barely remember them. The map of the city I’d memorized. The pills and money in Ribbons’s getaway pack. The bent heroin spoon in the shot-up Dodge. The numbers written on the back of the realtor’s card. The Uzi and the silencer left in oddly different places. The Wolf’s cryptic story about the little girl. Virginia.

  I put in Marcus’s number.

  The phone rang, then the familiar Midwestern voice answered. “You’ve reached the Five Star.”

  “I’m looking for Marcus. It’s the ghost.”

  There was a delay while he carried the phone back to him. I could hear every footstep and every clang of the kitchen equipment.

  When Marcus finally spoke, his voice was on the edge of collapse. “Jack?” he said.

  “Marcus,” I said. “I know where the money is.”

  43

  Here’s how I explained it to him. Every for-sale house in the United States has a number. Not just a street address, but another number as well. A code, of sorts, called a MLS, for Multiple Listing Service. When a realtor puts a house on the market it gets a six- or seven-digit number which allows any realtor in the country to look it up off a database so, for example, an agent who lives in Philadelphia can look at houses for sale in Atlantic City without having to drive out there.

  Ever since the economy went into the toilet, however, there have been hundreds of thousands of houses on the market that nobody wants. Everybody’s selling but nobody’s buying. This goes for foreclosed houses, especially. They sit there with For Sale signs for a few dozen months, then start to rot. And an abandoned house is the perfect place to hide out after a heist. The people who used to live there are long gone, and there’s no chance that someone might come around to look at it after so long. It can be hard to find one out of the blue, but it’s a lot easier if you know a dirty real-estate agent or bank-property manager willing to “rent” you the place for a short period of time under the table.

  The seven digits on the back of that business card weren’t a phone number. They were the number for a house. And Virginia isn’t just a state. It’s also the name of an avenue in Atlantic City.

  “But do you have anything to back up this theory of yours?” Marcus said.

  “I’ll go check it out now.”

  “I don’t want promises. I want to hear you’ve got the money, and then I want to hear that you’ve buried it so deep you’d need an excavator to get it out.”

  “It won’t be long,” I said. “This is the sort of place I’d go if I were on the run.”

  “But Ribbons isn’t you. You’re good at this.”

  “There’s no need to remind me.”

  I could imagine Marcus chewing his lip. “Has the Wolf given you any more trouble?” />
  “Not for a few hours now.”

  “Let me know if anything happens. I want to be done with the East Coast as soon as possible.”

  “Got it.”

  I shut the phone, stripped out the battery and dropped it in a trash-can down the hallway. I carried the rest of the phone a little farther, snapped it in half, then tossed the pieces down a storm drain.

  I got back to the car. I cranked the engine and turned on the GPS device in the dash. I wanted to be absolutely sure where I was going. I pressed the buttons and scanned the city from the sky. I looked up and down the length of Virginia Avenue, then took another cell phone out of my pack and powered it up. Once the screen went white, I started dialing the Wolf’s number. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello,” I said back, “who is this?”

  It wasn’t the Wolf. The voice on the other end of the line was thick and gravelly. The connection was poor. I waited for the line to clear up, but it didn’t. All I could hear was the rush of the car under me and the rumble of a thick male voice.

  “Nobody. Who the fuck are you?” the man said.

  “This is the ghostman. I want to talk to the Wolf.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you. In fact, when he finds you he’s gonna take a hammer to all of your fingers.”

  “Believe me, he wants to talk to me.”

  “You’re a walking dead man, you know that?”

  “Yeah. But I’m a very rich dead man.”

  There was a pause.

  The guy was thinking, breathing heavily. After I moment I heard the sound of the phone rub up against some fabric. A few seconds later there was the sharp sound of the phone changing hands and someone else drawing his breath.

  “What do you want?” the Wolf said.

  “I want to make a deal.”

  44

  The line went silent for a moment, and I could hear people talking quietly in the background. The connection still wasn’t any good and I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like the Wolf was speaking to one or two other people in the room with his hand wrapped around the phone to mask his conversation.

  After a moment, the Wolf came back on and said, “You must have a death wish, Ghostman.”

  “Can I tell you what I’m suggesting?”

  “No, you fuck. You think you can kill two of my men, hospitalize another, total two of my cars and walk away alive? You’ve made your last mistake, Ghostman. I’ll sink you into the salt bog myself.”

  “Like I just said, I want to make a deal.”

  “You have ten seconds before I hang up and tell every man I’ve got to bring me your heart in a Mason jar.”

  “I’ve got something you want, though, and I want to offer you a chance to get it. I think you have to make a deal with me, because otherwise you’ll face dire consequences. If you work with me, you win. If you don’t, you lose.”

  “What makes you think I’d deal with you after what you’ve done?”

  “Because I know where the money is, and you’re a smart man.”

  “A smart man would as soon put a bullet between your eyes as look at you,” the Wolf said. “A smart man would know exactly how dangerous you really are and put you down before you kill anybody else.”

  “Then let me give you another reason,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You want to destroy Marcus more than you want to punish me, and I’m the best shot you’ve got to make that happen.”

  “You make a lot of presumptions, Ghostman.”

  “But I’m not wrong.”

  There was a brief moment of silence. For all the tough talk, the Wolf was a rational, intelligent man. The vitriol just gave him more time to think. He knew I was right. I wasn’t his biggest problem. If he could make Marcus my enemy, he’d forget about the three bodies and two cars in a New York second.

  “Your voice is different,” the Wolf said.

  “I changed it.”

  “So what do you want?” he said.

  “I want two hundred thousand dollars in cash or bearer bonds.”

  He snorted. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  “That’s my offer.”

  “You think too highly of yourself. I might be willing to offer you your life for Marcus’s head on a platter, but nothing else.”

  “Threatening to kill me won’t get you anywhere. I got away from your men out in the salt marsh without even trying. I don’t think you could catch me if you put everyone in your whole organization on my case. So if you want Marcus out of the way, you’re going to pay me two hundred grand. Otherwise I’ll bury the money, let it explode at the bottom of a hole somewhere and walk off like nothing happened. That’s my offer.”

  “I’d rather see you dead.”

  “Then this is the last you’ll ever hear of me,” I said. “Send Marcus my regards from prison. I’m pinning the heist on you.”

  “How do you suppose you’ll do that?”

  “I can make sure the money gets stashed away in a place that’s very important to you. That way, when it blows, the cops will swarm down over your operation like angels on Judgment Day.”

  “You think you can blackmail me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can.”

  The Wolf was silent for a moment, which was strange. He didn’t just stop talking, he stopped breathing.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I’ll give you a hundred thousand,” the Wolf said.

  “Two hundred. That’s less than a fifth of what’s in the federal payload. Don’t make me drive this hard, Harry. I don’t have a care in the world. I’ve already got the money. You shouldn’t try to push me around.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Depends on your counteroffer.”

  “I can give you fifty grand tonight, then another hundred on Monday. Any more would be reckless.”

  “Like hell,” I said. “I’m not staying in this shithole until Monday. Two hundred grand tonight, or I walk.”

  “The banks are closed, Ghostman. I can’t get that kind of cash together until they open. My bankroll isn’t liquid. I don’t keep big piles of cash just sitting around.”

  “You don’t? That makes you the first drug dealer in history who doesn’t have a cash problem. You know the Colombians have to build extra houses just to store all that money? You heard my price. Now cut the bullshit.”

  “One-fifty tonight, but no more. If you want more than that, I’ll see you in hell.”

  I was silent for a moment, then said, “Okay, I can live with that.”

  The Wolf made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. “Come to my suite in the Atlantic Regency in a few hours. I’ll have your money waiting.”

  “You have a suite in the Regency? What a coincidence.”

  “You sound like you don’t trust me.”

  “Your man just said you’d break all my fingers with a hammer. No, of course I don’t. I wouldn’t trust you for the time of day.”

  “I own the title to an abandoned strip club on the corner of Kentucky Avenue and North Martin Luther King Boulevard. We can meet there.”

  “I’m going to choose the place,” I said.

  “You’ve negotiated as far as you’re going to get today, Ghostman,” the Wolf said. “Let’s not continue this game, shall we? You’ll do the deal on my terms or you won’t do the deal at all. If you think I’m intimidated, you’re gravely mistaken. You will bring the federal payload to my club, alone, or the next time you see me will be through a cloud of spray paint and a plastic bag. Now, are you in or are you out?”

  I was quiet, just to make him wait.

  “You’ve got yourself a bargain,” I said.

  45

  Ribbons’s house was a one-story on North Virginia Avenue fifteen blocks from the Boardwalk. It didn’t take me long at all to find it. The place couldn’t have been more than twenty blocks from the Regency and I knew where to look. The neighborhood
was strangely nice. If I’d just been driving down the street, I never would’ve imagined Ribbons ending up here. The pavement was wide and smooth, and the shrub pines lining the sidewalk rustled in the sea breeze. People with real jobs lived in this neighborhood. People in neighborhoods like this had health insurance and retirement accounts and children playing in their yards. Ribbons had been hiding out in plain sight. He picked a spot where no one would think to look for a strung-out junkie with one or more bullets in him.

  After driving up and down the street for a while, I spotted the blue Victorian. I parked across from it and winced at the glare when I got out. The house itself was hideous. It looked like it had once been a grand summer home, but hardly any of its former beauty remained. The front door had plywood nailed over it, as did most of the windows. A large wooden For Sale sign was stuck in the lawn behind the mailbox, but it was slowly rotting from salt erosion and covered in graffiti tags, so I couldn’t see the name of the realtor. The house paint had peeled away to almost nothing, and the windows on the second floor were smashed out and were open to the elements. I looked up at it and whistled.

  I’m a connoisseur of hiding places and this one was great. First off, domestic residences are wonderful, and not just because they’re protected from searches by constitutional law. Ribbons could stay in there for days without much discomfort, and nobody would wonder much if he came and went. Second, it didn’t have a paper trail. The only person who could link him to this house definitively was the real-estate agent he’d bribed to get the address. Third, it didn’t fit the profile. It was in a neighborhood just a little too nice to attract the kind of police scrutiny that could ruin the whole arrangement, but not so nice that people would notice him living there. The place was perfect.