Ghostman (31 page)

I stopped first at Ribbons’s stolen Mazda Miata. When I opened the door, the smell made me gasp. It was like fish blood and rancid meat. I got over it in a moment and took a deep breath. The seat was coated with Ribbons’s blood and body matter, but it was all dried up and blackened after two days in the summer sun. I could see the spots where the spray-on clotting agent had worked and the spots where it hadn’t. I shut the door and left it there.

I got back in Lakes’s Bentley. I wasn’t entirely sure the car wasn’t
bugged, but it was better than the alternative. I got in and I tossed the blue Kevlar bag onto the passenger seat.

I had to stash the money before I did anything else, clearly. Of course I’d threatened to put the money somewhere connected to the Wolf, but I wasn’t going to follow through on that. I didn’t need to. The Wolf would buy my bluff either way. Now that I had the money, every minute I spent with it I took a risk that it might explode. My mind explored the map of the city while I drove. I took the road down the coast back into the heart of the city, imagining all the different hiding places and weighing the pros and cons in my head.

I was almost at the Boardwalk when the sky began to rumble and grow very dark very quickly. A storm front was coming through. Red thunderclouds were already flashing heat lightning over the ocean. The humidity was beginning to condense into acid rain. A minute later huge drops plopped down on the windshield and it was pouring full-blast. I looked up at the angry sky and flipped on the wipers.

The place I chose was a strip of abandoned beach just south of the city near the Absecon Inlet. It was a place just a little too rocky to serve much of a purpose. It was halfway between a beach and a cliff. There was a sharp turn in the road to direct traffic away from the deadly rocks and surf.

There were several benefits to hiding the money in such a place. This beach was far enough off the beaten path that nobody would simply come along and find the bag hidden among the rocks in the next few hours. Second, the tide was going out. That way there was no chance that the money might accidentally get swept away with the tide, no matter how big the waves got. Third, if the explosives managed to go off, I’d rather have them blow up out here where they wouldn’t hurt anyone. I wasn’t about to hide explosives somewhere a kid might find them.

As soon as I got out of the car I was soaked down to the bone. I slung the blue nylon bag over my shoulder and I pulled a cell phone out. I put in one of Marcus’s numbers to send him a text message.

No luck
, it said.

I took the battery and chip out of the phone and tossed the parts behind the sand dunes, off an old strip of two-lane highway past a sign warning people to stay off the beach. The wind hit me straight on, hard and epic, whipping my hair back and forth in one direction, then in another. After about a hundred feet I emerged from the stubby beach brush and faced the surf directly. It wasn’t that inky sort of dark—it was the kind of dark where it looked like someone had turned down the lights on the world. The air was as thick as soup. I made my way across the beach by the pale blue light from the city reflected off the ocean water.

I came to the edge of one of the largest sand dunes and stood there for a moment. The sea was more or less empty now. The tide was high and a storm was coming in. What few clouds there had been in the sky that afternoon had all been sucked up into the storm front brewing off the coast. Driftwood and bits of old beach trash, beer cans and spent fireworks lined the tidewater. A soaked blue child’s blanket. An empty gallon jug.

Off to my left maybe a hundred feet was a berm of heavy rocks that stretched out maybe another hundred feet into the ocean to break the force of the waves coming into the harbor. At the end the water crashed up against the rocks hard enough to polish them clean.

When I was a child I used to dream about seeing the ocean. When you grow up in Las Vegas, you never learn to associate sand with water. I’ve been moving around the world since I was twenty years old. I haven’t stayed in one place for more than a year since I stopped introducing myself to people with my real name. I’ve missed the sand. I thought for a moment where I might want to go after this. I couldn’t go back to Seattle, that’s for sure. I thought about the wide-open desert. If I could find a job out there, I would, if only to remind me of home.

I jammed the blue bag between two rocks. It fell just deep enough between them that it rested a few inches above the frothing water but well out of sight from the casual observer. If it came time for the money to explode, all the stained bills would be carried out to sea and washed
clean by the frothing waves. They’d still be destroyed, but the effect would be the same. Before I went any further, I needed to be sure of that. I took out a cell phone and snapped a picture of the money, just so I could have proof. The Wolf would ask for the money in advance. I’d give him a picture instead.

I made my way slowly back to the car. I punched in the number for Information into the cell phone and asked for listings at the local marina. It took me a while to find what I was looking for, but I eventually got through to a company called Atlantic Maritime Adventures. The guy on the other end said, “How can I help you?”

“I’d like to buy a boat,” I said.

49

Alexander Lakes was waiting for me at the diner. He looked even worse than he had twelve hours ago—his eyes were bloodshot and his face was wrinkled with stress lines. There was a heavy two-day stubble poking out in patches from his chin and neck, and a coffee stain down the middle of his tie. He hardly moved when he saw me. He raised his hand slowly off the table and waved.

The place was nearly empty. It was getting into the evening now and the whole vibe was different. Rain was thumping against the glass windows. Burgers were frying on the flat top and steam was rising off the coffee machine. The line cook gave me a double-take as I walked by. I couldn’t quite figure out what it meant. Maybe I reminded him of someone he’d seen before.

When I got close to the booth, Lakes said, “You look different.”

I shrugged and said, “I’m getting that from all sides today.”

“No, you look like a whole different person. I barely recognized you.”

“I hope you brought what I asked for.”

He picked up a white dress shirt from the shopping bag full of clothes next to him. A black Calvin Klein suit, a red tie and a belt.

“And the gun?” I said.

“Thirty-eight revolver, like you were carrying before. I’ve scratched the rifling on the barrel and removed the serial number, so it’s totally clean. It’s cheap and it’ll make a lot of noise, but it packs a punch.”

He set it down on the table for me to see. It wasn’t much better than the gun I’d taken off Grimaldi, but it would do in a pinch.

“Okay,” I said.

I slid into the booth across from him. Lakes immediately shifted back in his seat as if afraid. There were coffee stains on the table and a hamburger on a plate between us that he’d hardly touched—the meat had started to go brown in the middle and stiff around the edges. He must have been on his twelfth coffee refill. All the empty single-serving creamer cups were next to the ketchup. He must have been here all day.

“How long have you been waiting?” I said.

He looked at his watch. “Nearly all day now. When you said you’d probably take a while, I thought, you know, like an hour or something.”

“Do you have a car for me?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat electronic key on a rental-company chain. He slid it to me across the table. He moved with a strange mixture of exhaustion and terror. His arm shook a little. I looked at the key and put it in my pocket.

“This is the red Accord parked down the block,” he said. “It’s registered under the name Michael Hitchcock, so if you get pulled over you’ve got to pretend you know him. Hell, with your new look you could pretend to
be
him. He’s a white male with dark hair and thirty-five years old.”

“Has there been any news?”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest, but you probably already know that. Your face was all over the TV. They’ve got some airport-security photo of you circulating. A pretty good close-up of you talking to some FBI chick. They also listed your height and weight and date of
birth. I was worried, but I guess I don’t have to be. You don’t even look like the same person now. What the hell happened?”

“I fixed myself up before driving over. Took a shower.”

“Must’ve been one hell of a shower.”

“I can’t wait to get into that new suit.”

Lakes nodded. “You need it.”

Lakes nodded in the direction of the television over the bar. The sound was off and a commercial for the Atlantic Regency was playing, but I got the point. He’d spent hour after hour doing nothing but watching my face flash over and over again on the news and worrying if he might get caught. Now my face was different. A lot of people have a hard time getting used to that.

We sat in silence for a while, and I watched him nervously drink more coffee and finger the center button on his jacket. He was waiting for me to say something, but I wanted to take my time. Lakes had been betraying me to the Wolf. I wanted to make him sweat.

I picked up the revolver, checked to see all six cylinders were loaded and put it back on the table, facing Lakes. Then I took out the tracking device I’d taken off his Bentley.

He froze with his coffee cup halfway between the table and his mouth. It took him a second to recover and put the cup back down. Once he did and looked up at me, he was panicked. He knew what he’d done. He knew what I’d do in response. He’d been giving me bugged cars and selling my location. In my line of work, a betrayal like that usually merits a bullet in the brain. A betrayal like that is
unforgivable
.

Lakes swallowed hard.

“Were these on every car you gave me?” I said.

He didn’t say anything. Lakes was like a deer in headlights. I could understand why he didn’t want to answer. If he lied and I found out, I’d kill him. If he told the truth, he’d be incriminating himself and I’d kill him. Whatever he said, it would end badly for him.

“So,” I said, “if I go outside right now and look under the Accord you got me, will I find one of these?”

Lakes didn’t say anything. He nodded.

“You’ve been giving the Wolf every detail, haven’t you?”

Lakes didn’t move.

I sighed, then put my right hand on the revolver and with my left covered it with napkins. The diner was quiet, and sitting in the deep, high-backed booth we were almost invisible. I pulled the hammer back and the ratchet made a soft click as the cylinder snapped into place. The chamber was loaded and locked with a 130-grain hollow point.

“I should’ve known better, actually,” I told him. “You’re the only fixer in this town, and the Wolf’s the only marker. I should’ve realized you were either working for him or too incompetent to qualify. It was my own damn fault for trusting you.”

Lakes looked down at the gun and didn’t say a word.

“You can speak, you know,” I said. “I’m not about to kill you without hearing your side of it. As a matter of fact, now that I know you’re working for the other team, I think we’ll have a stronger relationship. I have good reasons for keeping you alive. Of course, I also have good reasons to keep this gun locked and cocked.”

Lakes still didn’t say anything.

“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo
’?”

Lakes shook his head and whispered, “Is that Latin?”

“Yeah, it’s Latin.”

“I’ve never heard it before.”

“Do you want to know what it means?”

Lakes stared back at the pile of napkins and said, “I’m not sure if I do.”

“You do. Believe me, you do.”

“Okay. What does it mean?”

“It means a lot of things. I first encountered the phrase when I was a kid, in fact. Back then I used to read everything I could get my hands on. Every time a new book popped up on the rack at the supermarket, I’d buy it, and if I couldn’t afford it I’d read as much as I could right
there in the checkout line. I lived in the library. I’d get in people’s way sometimes, because I always had my head down. But even though I read so much, I never really found a book I liked. I found most books okay—they’d be thrilling, or romantic, or scary, or true, but none of them really seemed to satisfy me somehow. There was always something missing. So I kept on. I did the literary stuff. I read
Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon.
Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie.
The Name of the Rose
. They didn’t really move me, though. Then one day, somebody gave me a copy of
The Aeneid
. Do you know the story of
The Aeneid
?”

He shook his head.

“How about Troy?
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
? Trojan horses and sea monsters and all that?”

“Yeah, I know that stuff.”

“
The Aeneid
is an epic poem about the founding of Rome. It’s sort of a sequel to
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. It follows a young man named Aeneas who escapes Troy after it falls to the invading Greek armies. With the remains of his people, he sets sail across the Mediterranean. He has adventures, falls in love, fights bad guys, experiences the supernatural. He did everything I liked to read about when I was a kid, and then some. I felt I
was
Aeneas. Like him, my real parents were out of the picture. Like him, I felt I was destined for something big. Like him, I was bored with an everyday life. And like him, I wasn’t a good guy. At least not in the traditional sense. Aeneas had to do bad things to get where he needed to go.”

“You read Latin when you were a kid?”

I shrugged. “Some kids collect model planes. I read Latin. It isn’t that hard to understand. I loved reading so much, plus I wanted to be Aeneas. But, you see, Aeneas knew his destiny, because a prophet had told him. I had no idea what would happen to me. Most days I felt like I wasn’t destined to be anything. I felt like I didn’t exist, except when I was reading that book. The only other time I felt more alive was the day I first bashed a man’s head in and robbed him in broad daylight.”