Ghostman (11 page)

I drew the rectangle. I put the numbers in all four corners.

She stopped me right there.

“Nope,” she said.

I tossed the pad of paper away across the desk.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“I want to teach you something.”

“What do you think this could possibly teach me?”

“I want to teach you to think about what you assume you already know.”

I glowered at her for a second. Chewed my lip.

Angela took a dollar bill from her pocketbook and put it on the table in front of me, faceup. Brand new. It couldn’t have been newer or fresher or crisper if it had just been pressed and cut yesterday.

I stared at it.

It was black and white. Only the serial numbers and the treasury seal were green. My eyes were stuck there, lost in the blackness and whiteness of the bill.

“Memory is a funny thing,” she said. “We remember American money as green, even though the fronts of the bills aren’t. But that’s not the lesson here.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that bill.

She said, “This lesson is about trust.”

Then she picked up the green pen, stood up and walked away. Her coffee cooled on the desk and sat there until morning, when I finally got up the nerve to pour it out. The dollar bill stayed longer. I still have it somewhere. I keep it as a reminder of something. I’m not sure what.

The next day we went to work.

14

ATLANTIC CITY

I followed the short, twisty route through the heart of the city, reconstructing Ribbons’s getaway in my head. I could see him driving in front of me, pushing the limits of the shot-up getaway car until the chassis shook and smoke curled out from the hood. He was wrestling with the wheel. His rims sent up showers of sparks. Coolant and oil were leaking. But Ribbons kept driving. He had to. It was that or go back to prison.

Leaving the casino district was like dropping off the edge of the earth. Back there by the Boardwalk, the city was bustling with commerce. Five blocks farther down, the surroundings felt like a third-world country. In just a three-minute drive, I went from hundred-million-dollar penthouses to blighted slums. This non-neighborhood resembled a crack addict’s mouth; row houses stood out like crooked, rotten teeth with huge gaps between them.

I passed a broken fence the city had put up around the abandoned airstrip to keep people out. The place didn’t look like much—or anything at all, really. I might have driven past, had I not been searching for it. The Civic’s engine was the only sound. Nearby I could see a whole
baseball stadium with plywood over its windows and doors. I drove past another rusted fence that separated the landing strips from what had been the airport parking lot. In another era, there would have been security checks and floodlights and closed-circuit cameras every fifty feet. Now, the only floodlights would come in at night from across the thin saltwater inlet at the end of the runway, where the casinos cast long shadows over the bits of pipe and the blocks of concrete where the control tower had stood. Brown grass pushed itself up between the cracks.

The engine ticked as it cooled. I got out and bit the air.

It was a smaller place than you might’ve guessed. Part of it had been repurposed, part of it hadn’t. A couple of places almost looked like a public park, and a couple of others were pure urban blight. Piles of trash. Industrial remnants. Burned-out cars and waterlogged furniture. There were acres of empty buildings and spray-painted concrete blocks that had been torn loose by salvage crews but never hauled away. I saw a few gaps in the fence where a person could drive in, but I didn’t. I ducked through one of them and went in by foot. Nature had started to reclaim the land. What used to be roads for baggage trucks and flash pits for runway lights were now dirt paths and concrete sinkholes. The landing strip had become a field again, and the paint had cracked long ago. I guessed that there were periodic patrols, but I saw no signs of recent activity. The No Trespassing signs were worn and painted over with indecipherable street tags. It was like an unclaimed junkyard. I walked through it until I got close to the center, where there was a cluster of abandoned buildings. Two empty red dumpsters and a soccer goal post, left inexplicably on their sides in the dirt, sat sentry over the far runway.

The first building, which I supposed had once been a hangar, was locked from the outside with a chain that had withstood many hoodlums. It was held together by a combination lock with four tumblers, connecting two brown-tinted links. The lock and the chain had rusted together.

The second hangar looked much the same. There was a pile of garbage in between, and I could smell rotting waste and animal feces.

I started off toward the third hangar.

But then I heard it.

It was a sharp chirp, somewhere between the sound of metal hitting metal and the chime of a bell. It was faint enough that I barely caught it over the breeze.

For a soft moment I waited, listening, but heard only my heartbeat. Then the wind picked up and the stench of the garbage hit me even harder. I looked around, in case there was someone there. I moved slowly, very slowly, toward where I thought the sound had come from. I turned the corner, back toward hangar two. This one had double barnstyle doors designed to slide open from the center. In the airport’s heyday, this building would have protected a half dozen private planes from the elements. Now it smelled like any other rusted warehouse. I looked closer at the chain holding the door segments together.

It had been snapped in two places.

The doors were cracked just a few inches. The inside of the hangar was pitch-black. Two sets of tread marks led into it. I stepped carefully around them. Car prints. Fresh. At that moment, my breath stopped.

Blood.

Caked on the hangar’s right door handle was a small red splotch in the shape of a thumbprint. The blood was smeared unevenly over the handle, hanging in thick clots where it had dried and was beginning to flake off.

I slid the hangar doors open.

15

Inside was the getaway car.

It was a ’92 white Dodge Spirit—or at least it had been white, before it was crashed a few times and shot up with a rifle. There were spider-vein cracks in the windshield, where bullets had passed through the glass and left perfect small circles. The rust stains on the body were so deep that the paint had started to peel, and all four tires were as flat as strips of paper wrapped around the hubs.

The old hangar felt like a cavern. Back when the airport still ran flights, a hangar this size could have housed four prop planes front to back, or a single five-window Cessna half the size of Marcus’s Sovereign. Now the steel floor was thick with grime and broken glass, and the thin insulation on the walls was rotting from the inside out. Stagnant water had pooled under the empty skylights. When the field had closed its gates, the city must have salvaged anything of value. Even the Plexiglas. This would’ve been the perfect place for Ribbons to ditch this old getaway car and stash their next one. It was dirty and easily overlooked, but no more than a five-minute drive from the Regency. And I’d done it in traffic.

Before I did anything I slid on my pair of leather gloves. I may not
have fingerprints, but a guy’s hands have more identifying characteristics than you might think. My skin still produces oils that my fingerpads leave behind in a unique scarred, splotchy pattern. Only an expert would recognize them, but it’s still possible. Also there’s DNA that a smart guy could isolate. I didn’t exactly expect to get caught due to something like that, but I wasn’t about to take any risks I didn’t absolutely have to.

I walked carefully around the marks in the dust, where the treads of two cars had dragged mud in from the field. I guessed that one set of tracks was from Ribbons driving the Dodge in, and the other set from taking the second car out. I peered in through the partly shattered windshield. There were bullet holes everywhere. Big ones, from the rifle. There were deep bloodstains in the driver’s-side upholstery, straight down to the foot well. The blood had bonded with the fibers and scabbed there like a permanent dye. Most of it was still liquid, but very thick and dark from coagulation. You’d be amazed by how fast the stuff sinks in and clots. It is hard to remove. It must be washed out with cold water and bleach. I had to do it after a job, once. I leaned over the driver’s-side window. Bone and brain matter were scattered through the interior as well. It was so thick in places that it hardly looked real.

Drops of blood tell a story—and they aren’t hard to read, if you know what to look for. Moreno must have been in the car when he was shot. The drops on the windshield were fine, less than a millimeter wide, and beginning to skeletonize, which suggested his head had been close to the wheel and the direction of impact came from behind. I traced the angles of the spatter to the area of convergence. The bullet had entered his skull from the back of his head and passed through his midbrain and exited through the forehead. There was high-impact spatter, but nothing suggesting a secondary bleed. The shot had killed him instantly. High-caliber. Well-aimed.

I took a look at Ribbons’s blood. Even in this mess, I could tell which blood was which. Ribbons’s blood had a different character to it. The drops were bigger. Ribbons’s blood-spatter droplets were seven millimeters wide and grouped tightly. They made a stain all the way
down the left side of the driver’s seat, from about shoulder height down. That wasn’t spatter from a gunshot. No way. It was secondary bleeding, which must have taken place after the initial bullet impact. Big drops like that indicated passive spatter, which told me that Ribbons had dumped Moreno’s body, but only climbed into the driver’s seat after taking a bullet himself. I looked around but couldn’t find the high-impact spatter from Ribbons’s initial wound, so he must’ve been shot outside the car.

I put myself in his position for a minute. I closed my eyes and felt his panic and pain wash over me like a tremendous wave. He was running on pure instinct. The getaway plan was the only thing he knew. It was the only thing he trusted.

I blinked and took a closer look at the car. There were tool marks between the window and the weather strip, where one of them had jimmied the lock. The car had been stolen because they knew they’d have to ditch it immediately. Beside the bloodstains, in the cup holder was an empty pint of bottom-shelf bourbon.

I had to put my sleeve over my nose. The car smelled terrible.

The smell was like an air conditioner, but foul. There was something both sulfuric and chemical about it, like gasoline mixed with nail-polish remover. Blood and brain matter don’t smell like that. I pointed the light from my cell phone through the windows of the car. Between the front seats was a small leather case. Moreno had held such a case under his arm when we met in Dubai. I never asked, because I knew that inside there would be a bent spoon, a lighter, a length of foil and a glass pipe. It was a case for smoking cocaine and crystal meth. Moreno, I’d heard, preferred to let it vaporize so he could suck it up through a rolled-up bill. When he wasn’t smoking or drinking, he’d scratch the sore on his face. When I knew him, he scratched and scratched and scratched.

But the smell wasn’t that.

Freebasing smells astringent and slightly metallic. I’d been around enough thugs and addicts to know firsthand, though I’d always refused to join them when they offered. This didn’t smell anything like that. It was much worse.

I circled around toward the other side of the car. The stench seemed to get worse by the trunk. Blood was spattered over the left hubcap, with tiny loose bloody chunks of skull lodged in the trim of the wheel well. Jesus. For a moment I could visualize Ribbons panicking, tossing Moreno’s body out onto the pavement and shifting into Reverse. The car had rolled over his head and crushed it. The trunk was locked. It took a minute to find the release. Inside was a black duffel bag with empty boxes of discount imported rifle ammunition. The boxes were cut down, as if with a letter opener. Only one unfired round was left and I examined it—7.62 × 39mm steel-core bullet, almost certainly for Ribbons’s AK-47. He might have left it behind during the frenzy, or dropped it while he was loading his magazines. I put the bullet in my pocket, then opened the spare-tire compartment, in case the smell was coming from there. No. I opened a side door to the backseat.

Under the seat was a soft leather briefcase with more ammunition inside. I ran a single gloved finger over the passenger window, and felt the stress cracks. My glove came off marked with dirt and blood residue. The two bullets had cut through the upholstery. They were somewhere deep under the seats, unless they’d gone right through.

I ducked out of the back and closed the door, took a few steps forward and pulled on the passenger’s-side door. It was unlocked. I checked the glove box, where I found a plastic bag containing better than half a dozen orange pill bottles. Hemostabil, ibuprofen, dextromethorphan, diazepam, phenobarbital. I recognized a few. Ibuprofen was the major ingredient in several popular over-the-counter painkillers. Dextromethorphan was a cough suppressant. Diazepam and phenobarbital were sedatives, probably to calm their nerves and take the edge off the crystal meth. All of them together looked like the combat cocktail I’d heard rebel soldiers used to take in South America. Behind the drugs was an aerosol canister labeled QuikClot. I recognized the brand, having seen a bit about it on the news a few years ago during the Second Gulf War. Soldiers would spray it on and their wounds would clot over and stop bleeding for a while. It saved a few hundred lives, so they brought it
stateside for hemophiliacs. Now anybody could get some, if they knew where to look. Band-Aid of the future. Comes sprayed out of a can.

I could imagine Ribbons parking the car and scrambling to field-dress his wound. But gunshot wounds are tough. They bleed deep. If he was smart, he would have jammed in something soft to plug it up, like a scrap of fabric or even a piece of a hamburger bun, and then tied it off with a strip of his shirt or some plastic wrap. With the QuikClot and some basic first aid, Ribbons could have kept himself conscious for hours after his gunshot wound.