Ghostman (20 page)

That part, it turns out, wasn’t an act.

Once we were back in the elevator Angela pressed the button to make the doors close, then paced once around the compartment and looked carefully at each of the light fixtures. There were hidden cameras, of course, but no microphones. Most elevators don’t have audio security, but she checked anyway. Once she was sure we weren’t being recorded, she leaned up against the brass bar on the back wall and whispered in my ear, “This bank’s a goddamn deathtrap.”

“I love it,” I said. “Did you see that vault?”

“The vault’s Diebold Class II, with a time-specific triple-custody delay lock, which means three managers have to enter three different codes known only to them simultaneously, and at certain times of the day known only to them, and once they do, the vault doesn’t open right away. It starts a timer that opens the safe half an hour later. Yes, I saw the fucking vault.”

“I’m going to love getting through that thing,” I said.

“No you’re not, because we’re walking away. If the vault weren’t enough of a problem, once we have the money we’re only a block from a police station and only a five-minute drive from PGK headquarters. That means helicopters and assault teams. We can expect guys in black masks and body armor dropping from zip lines, just like in the movies. We’ll be in cuffs before we ever touch that vault door. Or we’ll be dead.”

I said, “Did you think stealing over seventeen million bucks was going to be easy?”

“I expected it to be survivable. This isn’t.”

I shook my head.

“We should walk away from this job,” Angela said. “Vanish. Go to Prague. Book a suite in the Boscolo and stay there for a month.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“I’m not doing this because it’s fun,” Angela said. “I want to get rich and live a normal life.”

“Do you know how bored I am being
normal
?” I said. “I live for challenges like this.”

“It’ll get us killed.”

I shook my head and said, “Then that’s how it’s got to be.”

28

ATLANTIC CITY

I drove in silence for a while. I was halfway to Hammonton before I spotted my abandoned Suburban on the side of the road. I was lucky that the state police hadn’t spotted it and called for an impound. When I parked behind it, I could hear a single car passing in the other direction. The highway was empty at this time of night.

Angela used to say she had a list of rules for surviving as a ghostman. Among them were only three she never broke and never changed. I used to call them the Big Three, like they were some sacred catechism handed down to us by god himself. The first: Never kill unless you don’t have a choice. The second: Don’t trust anyone you don’t absolutely have to. The third: Never make a deal with cops.

The last one was strictly practical. The police aren’t in the business of letting criminals get away. No matter how corrupt a cop might be, he’s still sworn an oath to protect and serve the people and laws of his jurisdiction. You could call me a cynic, but an oath is an oath. You can’t cut a deal with somebody who has sworn to take you down. Simply put,
police are the enemy, and no amount of talk, money or drugs will ever change that. And the cop isn’t always the problem.

Sometimes the guys in your crew are.

There’s a word for a heister who talks to the police—several, in fact.
Snitch, rat, stool, fink
. In some parts of the world, just giving a so-called peace officer the time of day is enough to earn a trip to the hospital courtesy of your associates. Nobody is more reviled than a guy who spills to the law. A person who vanishes on a job has a chance of earning redemption, if he works hard enough, but a snitch might as well sign the cops’ affidavit, go home and kiss a Beretta. A witness-protection agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Jugmarkers are notorious for taking revenge on people who rat on them. Some don’t even kill snitches right away. They kill a guy’s whole family first, just to get his attention. They’ll send somebody with a box of knives to work over the snitch’s mother. Then they’ll kill the girlfriend. Then the brothers. The sisters. The children.

Then time’s up.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Rebecca Blacker. I could see the black eyeliner running along her lower eyelids and her hair spilling over her shoulders in rough tangles. I pictured her badge booklet. The woman in the picture was so much younger. Full of youthful excitement, anxiety, terror. The one I met was cool and calm and jaded. She was a different person now. I wondered how long it would be before she’d try to take me down, or if she was trying to already.

I used the sleeve of my suit to wipe down the wheel of the SUV, the gearbox and the door handle, both inside and out. I remembered to wipe the passenger and rear doors too. I took off the jacket, tie and shirt, which had blood on them, and threw them in the backseat along with the last two pieces of my revolver.

I went back to my SUV and pulled on a new shirt from my satchel and put on my old suit jacket, then went back to Aleksei and Martin’s SUV and opened the back hatch just to see if they had anything useful there. In addition to a second shovel, there was a length of green garden
hose, two sweatsuits, a torch lighter, a spool of low-gauge wire, wire cutters, pliers, three knives, a box of large black trash bags, a hacksaw, duct tape and a hammer. To a naïve observer, this might have looked like an everyday collection of home supplies. But low-gauge wire is twice as good as rope if you want to tie someone down. Double-ply contractor bags can hold fifty pounds of human flesh without leaking. A garden hose can hurt worse than a baseball bat, if you know how to swing it right. A hacksaw can do lots of things.

This was a torture set.

I took the sweatpants and ripped them down the center and tore one of the halves in half again. I straightened out a length of the wire that was roughly two and a half feet long, then wrapped the cotton fabric around it.

If I wanted to, I could have cleaned up this SUV out here in the pine barrens for the cops to find. Wiped down like this, they’d probably just return it to the owner. Hell, if I’d wanted to make a few bucks, Alexander Lakes could recommend a half a dozen chop shops that would pay good money for it, no questions asked, and have it cut down to parts by morning. But I didn’t want to play it safe.

I wanted to send a message.

I went to the side of the SUV and opened the fuel cap, then fed the wire and cloth into the tank until I felt it hit the bottom. There wasn’t a whole lot of gas in there, which was a good thing. Less gas means more oxygen. I made sure the end of the rag was good and soaked with fuel before pulling it out again. Once I did, I pushed the other end of the wire down into the tank until it hit bottom, so this way the whole rag was soaked in gasoline, including a little two-inch tuft protruding from the fuel cap. I backed away from the car a little bit and held the torch lighter to the gasoline-soaked fabric and waited for it to blacken and shrivel up. I tossed the lighter through the car window and walked away.

I opened the other Suburban with the wireless key. I got in, started the engine and pulled out back on the highway with my hazards on so anyone in the right lane could see me coming. I checked my watch.
Exactly 4 a.m. It was still too early for the car-rental companies to be open, and I needed to switch vehicles soon if I wanted to stay inconspicuous. The Wolf would have eyes all over the city looking for a black Suburban with these plates. And I had to assume the Fed knew the make and model as well. If she could find the hotel room, she’d certainly be smart enough to figure that out too. How many rental cars could have been parked in the Chelsea garage? Ten? Twenty, at most?

Behind me, the torn fabric burned slowly, like cotton does, until the flames crawled down the fuel pipe. Fumes don’t usually ignite by themselves, but liquid gasoline mixed with oxygen does. The rag had to burn all the way down to the fuel in the tank.

I was a hundred yards away when it did. The engine exploded and all three-quarter tons jumped two feet to the left. A second later, the fire ignited the plastic, fabric and leather in the cabin and sent the whole car up. It would burn like that for hours, if they’d let it. The Suburban must’ve been worth eighty grand with all those options, but it would be scrap metal by the time I got to my exit. The flames illuminated the pine trees like a giant bonfire and sent smoke drifting across the highway. I drove until the dancing lights were just a speck in the distance and the only thing I could smell was the salt coming in off the ocean.

I had to go be a rat.

29

The highway back toward the city was as empty as the Sahara, the Suburban’s headlights revealing only pavement and the faded yellow lines down the center of the road. Off to the side were casino billboards. With the SUV going sixty miles an hour, they all seemed to blend together, like they were caught by a time-lapse camera. The wind was coming in hard against the windshield now, carrying bits of trash and sand.

I wasn’t four miles into the drive before one of my cell phones rang. It was still in the bag I’d left on the passenger seat. I fished it out and saw that the incoming number was the one Rebecca Blacker had given me on her card. I flipped the phone open and sandwiched it between my cheek and my shoulder so I could talk and drive.

“Took you long enough,” I said.

“Jack Morton’s a real pain in the ass, you know that?” she said. “I searched that room for two hours before I found your goddamn note.”

“I was beginning to think you’d somehow missed it. And don’t you ever sleep? I didn’t expect you to call until morning.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m back on vacation.”

“Can I ask why you were searching that room?”

“I found the getaway car,” she said. “Thought you’d know something about it, also that I might find something linking you to the scene.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Sure you don’t,” she snarled.

“What happened?”

“The ACPD found it two hours ago. What’s left of it, anyway. It was blown to hell in a building out by the old airfield. Somebody covered it with enough fuel to raze the whole goddamn place. All that’s left is a bunch of twisted metal and a couple parts made of that heat-tempered material that doesn’t melt. It took an hour just to identify the make and model.”

“Tough break.”

“You know, Jack, I’ve seen a lot of torched getaway cars before, but I’ve never seen a car blow itself up a full seventeen hours after the job went down.”

“You think somebody got there before you.”

“Two people. We found footprints at the scene. Fresh ones. You wouldn’t happen to wear size-eleven shoes, would you?”

“I prefer boots. Better ankle support.”

“If you’re just going to play games with me, I’ll put out a warrant.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “You don’t have anything on me.”

“Then give me something,” Rebecca said. “You’re the one who left me this number, and I refuse to believe you did it just to fuck with me. You wanted me to call you. At least tell me why.”

“Are you tracing this call?”

“Excuse me?”

“This phone has a built-in global-positioning system,” I said. “They all do, these days. The chip in the back sends out a blip every fifteen seconds with its exact location. Coordinates, down to about ten meters. Latitude and longitude. That means you should be able to figure out where I am. Come on, you’re a Fed. You should be all over this.”

“You want me to know where you are?”

“I want you to know where I’ve been. Specifically, where this phone
has been for the past hour or so. And if you go back long enough, I’m sure you’ll see I was nowhere near your burned-up getaway car.”

“You could just tell me where you were, you know.”

“I was out along the highway. But you’ll want the coordinates.”

“And what were you doing out along the highway?”

“Just taking a drive.”

“At three in the morning.”

“I like the night air. Good for the lungs.”

“You stumble across anything interesting?”

“Just do it, will you?”

“Are you helping me,” Rebecca said, “or just trying to piss me off?”

“Neither. I’m telling you I went for an evening drive and left my phone on.”

“You’re so full of it.”

“You want to know where I was or not?”

“Honestly? I want your shoe size.”

“Ten and a half. Wide.”

A pause. I could hear her breathing. Her breath had a simple, quick cadence to it, like she hadn’t had the time to take a deep breath and let it out in months, maybe years. I could hear her fingers on a computer keyboard.

Then she said, “We should meet.”

“Is talking to me on the phone a problem?”

“I’d prefer to talk face-to-face.”

“You just said you might put a warrant out on me. I think I prefer a little distance, for the time being.”

“I’m not after you. Marcus Hayes can rob Fort Knox for all I care. He’s not my case. All I want are the people who turned this city into a bloodbath this morning, so I can go back down to Cape May and salvage what’s left of these shitty two weeks. And considering that burning white Dodge, I think you owe me.”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about that.”

“You want me to go out along the highway or not?”

“All right. Clearly we’re both awake, so let’s meet in the hotel coffee shop in an hour. A place like that never closes.”

“Which hotel?”

“You know the one,” I said. “You spent half the night there moving furniture around.”

“Fruitlessly, I might add. You didn’t even take the chocolates off the pillows.”

“How’d you find that room, anyway?”

“I told you,” Rebecca said. “I’m very good at what I do.”

“One hour.”

“See you then.”

I ended the call, then removed the plastic cover from the back of the phone and pulled out the battery. Under that was the SIM card, which gave the phone a number and made records of all the incoming and outgoing calls. I took it out and snapped it in half between my fingers, then flicked the pieces out the window. I looked at my watch. Quarter after 4 a.m.