Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I took out the phone and ended the call. This line had been connected since she called me after meeting with the Wolf. With the cell phone’s GPS sending out a signal every fifteen seconds, she could pinpoint my exact location and, by extension, that of the federal payload. Not only had I just handed her enough evidence to convict the Wolf, but I’d handed her the federal payload and the two guys in the penthouse as well.

  And it wouldn’t have been possible if she hadn’t put out a warrant for my arrest.

  I’ve never been good at law, but after a few bank robberies I learned a few things. You see, when the cops get a good lead on the location of a fugitive, they don’t need a search warrant to bust down the doors and look for him. All they need is a good reason to believe the fugitive is really there. They call this sort of thing an exigent circumstance, because if they were to wait around to get a search warrant the fugitive could easily escape. When Blacker put out a warrant for me she’d made me a fugitive, and the GPS signal from my cell phone was all the probable cause she needed to go looking for me in the Wolf’s penthouse. Once she raided the place, the plain-view doctrine would take over. Any evidence she found, even evidence of crimes unrelated to capturing me, she could seize and use as evidence. I just gave her everything she needed to make the charges stick. In twenty minutes, the federal payload would be on a magnetized plate in the evidence locker and the Wolf would be on the run from the police and Feds. Me? I’d be gone forever.

  I slung the $150,000 over my shoulder and smiled.

  60

  I left the Regency by foot and waded out into the crowds on the Boardwalk. The wind off the ocean was cool and the boards were slick from the rain. I slipped into the shadows and followed a staircase down onto the sand. There I wiped the Uzi clean, then pulled off the receiver and dropped the parts in a trash can near the surf.

  I weaved back through the crowd for a while before cutting through another casino, heading north. After that it was only a few blocks back to the diner where Lakes had parked the red Accord. I climbed in, leaned back in the driver’s seat and closed my eyes for a moment. After two days of this shit, the exhaustion was finally catching up. My hands felt like lead. My breath came out in shudders. After a minute or two a pack of police cars barreled down the street in the direction of the Regency. I waited for them to pass before I turned the key and pulled out. I punched in Marcus’s number into my cell phone and waited as it rang and rang and rang. It took longer than I expected for someone to pick up.

  “Five Star,” another Midwestern voice said.

  “I need to speak to Marcus.”

  “You’ve got the wrong number, man.”

  “It’s the ghost,” I said.

  It took longer than usual for the front man to bring the phone back. It was still early there, only 8 p.m. I could hear the sound of an industrial dishwasher. When Marcus came on, he didn’t say anything. I knew he was there only from his heavy breathing.

  “I found the money,” I said.

  Marcus skipped a beat. “Did you bury it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Your package will be delivered to the original intended recipient very soon,” I said. “Ribbons is dead and the trail’s cold. Once the cash is gone, nobody will be able to connect you to this heist. The Wolf has been taken care of.”

  “What?” Marcus said. “What about the federal payload?”

  “That isn’t going to be a problem,” I said. “The Wolf took the money in an exchange we just made. The FBI should arrest him for possessing it within the hour.”

  “How the hell did you manage that?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Are you sure this won’t blow back on me?”

  “I am,” I said. “Does this make us even?”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “It does.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because right now, I’m going to put this phone down. When I do, I’m going to disappear. You won’t look for me and you won’t find me. You won’t recognize my face and you won’t be able to distinguish my voice. You won’t know what I do or where I’m from or a single damn thing about me. The moment I put this phone down, you and I are going to be total strangers. It will be like we never met, so even if somehow our paths cross again, on a plane or at a restaurant or across a subway car, you’ll look the other way and I’ll disappear. Do you understand?”

  “Jack—”

  “Do you understand?”

  Marcus was quiet for a moment, then said, “I understand.”

  I didn’t wait for him to say good-bye. As soon as he said the words, I closed the phone and pried off the battery. I snapped the SIM card in two and threw it all out the window into the street.

  I looked at my watch. Quarter to 11 p.m.

  I’d done it with seven hours to spare.

  This city isn’t a good place to make a getaway. It’s the geography. Atlantic City sits on a crescent-shaped patch of shoreline that’s cut off from the rest of the mainland by miles and miles of uninhabitable salt marshes. While you’re standing on the Boardwalk the city may seem like it’s the center of the universe, but in reality, compared to most cities, it’s actually rather inaccessible. There are only five ways in or out. The first is to head north on a single highway that crosses the Absecon Inlet. Not a good idea. The second is to get on any one of the three freeways heading west across the salt marshes. Any one of the three would be full of state troopers. The third way would be to head through a maze of privately owned roads across the intercoastal waterways to the south. No way. The fourth way was the train station. I wasn’t about to try that, either. Even with a new look and identity, I couldn’t risk someone picking my face out from a crowd.

  So I needed to get out the fifth way.

  I needed to leave by boat.

  I had bought one for sixty thousand dollars with a black Visa over the phone a few hours ago. If there is one thing I’ve learned as a criminal, it’s that everything is for sale at the right price. Just the cost of the boat wiped out much of the profit I’d taken off the Wolf, but the money was never the point. I live for the rush, not the dollar signs attached to it. Now I could spend the next two weeks drifting anonymously down to Cuba, stopping only for food and gas. From there, I could scuttle the craft and start the whole process of creating an identity again. I’d do what I always do. I’d disappear.

  I took an hour or two to get to the marina just to be safe, but nevertheless Blacker was leaning against a pillar across from the boat when I got there. She had an odd look in her eyes and a crooked smile. Blacker stepped back nervously when she saw me and shouted from across the dock. “Over here!”

  I waved back.

  The boat was sitting in the spot below her. An older thirty-foot Carver that had been built in the eighties, maybe earlier, it was a stubby little thing with an upper deck closed off with mosquito net and a tattered American flag flapping at the back. The hull was dirty off-white and the tinted glass was beginning to show sun marks. It was called The Palinurus.

  When I got close, Rebecca said, “I got him. The federal payload was found in his suite not ninety minutes ago. If that weren’t enough to put him away, we also found one of his guys locked in the trunk of a Bentley in the parking lot. Guy shit his pants twice, and now he’s willing to roll on the Wolf’s whole operation in exchange for immunity and protection. They must’ve scared him real bad.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “I wanted to see you,” she said. “Once before you go, at least.”

  “Does this make us even?” I said.

  Rebecca nodded. She looked out over the ocean.

  I threw the black duffel bag off the side of the pier into the back of the yacht. “How did you find out about the boat?” I said.

  “Like I said, I’m good at this,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, though. I’m not going to stop you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I lowered the
ladder down to the deck of the boat.

  “I have one question,” she said. “Tell me one thing before you sail off and I never see you again.”

  “What is it?”

  “You never told me your name, Jack.”

  I cracked a smile.

  “You can call me Ghostman,” I said.

  Without another word, I climbed down onto my boat and untied the moorings. Blacker watched me for another few minutes before wandering off down the pier. I cast off a few minutes later, just after one in the morning.

  My body let out a wave of endorphins that made me weak in the knees. I took my first breath of fresh sea air once I was three miles out. I practically fell into the captain’s seat and closed my eyes for just a moment. I’d been on the go for close to two days, but even through the exhaustion I felt the most amazing excitement all over my body. It wasn’t because of the bag of money at my feet, either. It was from the pure ecstasy of the job. It reminded me of the exquisite feeling of robbing a bank, or falling in love for the first time. I felt powerful and alive. God, it was beautiful.

  Now there was only one thing left to do.

  Disappear.

  Autobiography of the Ghostman

  Exclusively for the eBook

  “Jack”

  This is the story of how I got my name. It isn’t very long, but I hope it’s worth reading. I’ve never been very good at telling stories.

  I was born in the maternity wing of St. Rose Dominican on January 2, 1974, a full month premature. That wasn’t the only thing wrong with me, either. My birth was every parent’s nightmare. I was far under normal birth weight: four pounds and six ounces. I was pale and my eyes were like dinner plates. When they held me up I didn’t cry, because I couldn’t take a breath. The certificate of live birth was filled out in pencil. It was never completed. There are still blanks all down the page, like the doctor didn’t know if he should bother. There wasn’t a whole lot to write down.

  I was born the way I was because of the drugs, probably. When a woman shoots heroin during pregnancy, I learned when I was older, it passes through the placental barrier into the fetus as early as the first trimester. My mother did that every day, even while I was growing inside her. The drug isn’t as hard on the child as you might imagine. It isn’t a teratogen, like thalidomide or Agent Orange. It isn’t even as bad as alcohol, someone once told me. But there are problems: miscarriage, fetal cranial bleeding, low birth weight, mental retardation. Of course, none of these side effects are guaranteed. Heroin just increases the risks.

  Only one thing is for sure.

  If the mother’s a junkie, so is the baby.

  From the moment I came out of the womb, I was an addict. The smack had been in my mother’s blood, so it was in mine, and suddenly it had been taken away. These days, a heroin-addicted newborn goes through the same treatment the mother would have gotten. It gets put on methadone, a synthetic heroin substitute that lasts longer and is a little safer. The methadone eases the withdrawal, so the child can eventually feed and sleep. But back then, methadone was still rare and unpopular. A low dose of the real thing was the only available treatment, at least the only one that had any chance of working. It was never used on children, for obvious reasons, and rarely on adults. A shot of heroin at the dose I would’ve needed was as likely to kill me as it was to save me, my breathing was so shallow. And even if someone had thought to give me some, I can’t imagine a nurse or doctor willing to administer it. It’s one thing to talk about treatment, and another thing entirely to swab the infant’s arm with alcohol, knock the air bubbles out of the needle and shoot junk into a child barely bigger than your own two hands. I’m not sure I could do it myself, even to save a child’s life.

  I’m not sure I could do it to save my own.

  I kicked the hard way. Cold-turkey. Withdrawal for newborns can be fatal, especially in those with low birth weight like me. There are blood problems and air problems and feeding problems. For the first week of my life, my little body couldn’t eat, sleep or breathe. I needed something that wasn’t there, like you or I might need oxygen. I would have cried constantly, if I’d been born with lungs large or powerful enough to do so. Instead I made a sound as if I were choking. It lasted all through the night, every night, like a slow death. My symptoms are still written there on the hospital papers, with a signature every thirty minutes by one of two nurses. My heart ran at a hundred beats a minute, twenty-four hours a day. My body tried to compensate for the heroin with adrenaline. I went through the shakes, and fever, and diarrhea, and vomiting. I don’t know how I survived. A lot of babies didn’t back then. I suppose I had a desire to live. Maybe I just wanted to prove I was better than my mother, even then. I did what she couldn’t do, and I was only two days old.

  And that’s all it took. Two days. I fell asleep for the first time in the afternoon of the third day. The next day, I could feed without choking. The next, I could cry all on my own. The day after that, I could take full breaths and make non-choking sounds and open my eyes. By the end of the first week, I was just like everyone else. I had ten fingers and ten toes and no idea who I was.

  But that was the problem.

  No one else knew, either.

  You see, I never met my mother. I’ve never even met anyone who had. The day before I was born, a woman was dumped on the pavement outside the St. Rose emergency room. She wore no clothing, and she was pregnant. There were black track marks down her arms and between her toes. She was seizing and contracting. Because of the heroin, there wasn’t much they could do to help her. The closer the contractions got, the clearer it became that she wasn’t going to make it. The membranes had all broken prematurely and she was losing blood. It was never a choice between me or her, I’m told. She was essentially dead before she got there. It was only a question of what they could do about me. I was delivered by Caesarean section right there in the emergency room. I was still inside her when she breathed her last. There are photos of her body somewhere, but I never wanted to see them. I still don’t know what she looked like. She was a Jane Doe then, and still is, now that she’s eight feet under the sandy earth in some unmarked stretch of the city cemetery in South Vegas where the basers go to smoke crack at night. My birth certificate read baby boy, mother unknown.

  I suppose that’s the only real name I’ve ever had.

  Baby Boy.

  I’m adopted. It didn’t take long for my new parents to find me. Newborns have a good chance. I was just big enough to be taken out of the incubator. I looked like I wanted to live, no matter how small I was, or so my parents were convinced. They were good people. Their names were Andrew and Melissa B______, from Philadelphia. Nobody was from Las Vegas back then. We were a whole city of imports, my birth mother included. The B______ family had moved out for work and settled down to start a family, but couldn’t conceive on their own. They took me home in a blanket to their postage-stamp house in the desert out by the Air Force base.

  When they first showed, I still didn’t have a name. There was one on the adoption papers and in the hospital records, but it wasn’t theirs and it never really fit. They hadn’t thought of a better name yet when they had to sign, so they wrote down what the doctors had called me at the hospital. John. Baby John Doe. So when they adopted me, I became Baby John B______. While John wasn’t a bad name, it just wasn’t mine. It took them years to start calling me that. To them I was always Baby, even after I got too old for it and demanded to be called something else.

  For the first few years of my childhood, I made do with John. I still sometimes catch myself turning my head when I hear someone shout it, as if I expect to see my father standing there and calling me in to eat. He tried so hard to make it fit, but I could always hear a little pause in his voice before he actually said the name, even when I’d call him on the phone late at night as an adult.

  It was never really my name.

  My father was a very good man. He worked in engineering on the Air Force base, and then lat
er in the suburbs when Vegas started to become what it is. He used to sit with me at the back of our house in the desert and tell me about working with the nuclear warheads. He pointed out to the horizon where the mushroom clouds had been.

  * * *

  Atmospheric testing north of Las Vegas was over by the time I was born, but I still remember his stories about sitting with my mother on a blanket and watching the blast come up like a sunrise. Vegas was built by men like him who had come here to practice blowing up the world. Without Oppenheimer, he said to me, there would be no Las Vegas. Without Vegas, there would be no me. I ran my fingers over the glossy images of the atomic explosions he kept in an album next to our family photos. He showed each one and I would re-create the blast in my head. He called me Baby as if it meant something.

  I grew up in that house. My parents never moved, even when Vegas got huge in the eighties and we could have sold the place for double the money and moved out somewhere else. They sent me to the local school, and I did very well there. I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I was sharp, and I never went to bed hungry. I thrived on books on ancient history and read every single one stocked in the library. Rome was always my favorite. Some days I would go out into the desert after school and imagine I was Caesar in North Africa, marching with my men across the desert to escape Pompey’s superior army. I would see the whole battle in my mind and hear the great thunderclaps of men in armor smashing into one another. I ran with them across the waste as if I were one of them. The sun would go down and the lights would come up on the Strip in the distance, like one of my father’s hydrogen bombs exploding just beyond the horizon. I would get tired and go home and sit inside and read and wait for my parents to call me to supper. My father never said anything, but he understood. In his mind there was always a mushroom cloud. In mine there was always a man in armor.

  We lived at the edge of the desert until I was eight years old, when the developments caught up and built a whole city around us. It happened so fast. One day we were alone, and the next we had neighbors. My father planted grass in the front yard every year. I’d watch it turn yellow in the heat and die. The grass in the subdivisions never died, so my father planted again and again and again. By the time I was ready to go to college, there was no desert left as far as anyone could see, with healthy green lawns around all the houses that by now had nearly reached the Air Force base where they kept the payloads. Vegas grew. My father’s grass never did.