Ghostman (2 page)

Moreno watched him, smoked his cigarette and stole a few pulls off the bottle of cough syrup. His heart skipped. A lot of people in the old neighborhood would have paid top dollar for this premium kind of high, but none of them ever did cough syrup anymore. Only him. Makes you see things like you do when you’ve got fever so high you’re on the edge of death. You see God waiting for you at the end of the tunnel. Nobody ever told him about the endless hard breathing, the heartbeat or the things he’d hallucinate once the DXM hit his bloodstream like an eight ball of ketamine. He listened to the radio and waited.

Moreno flicked his cigarette out the window and said, “Got your house picked out yet?”

“Yeah. Blue Victorian. Beautiful place down by the water. Virginia.”

“What did the lady say?”

“That it’s a buyer’s market. Our deal won’t be a problem.”

They sat quietly for a while, listening to the morning traffic report on the radio. Nothing much to talk about anyway, nothing they hadn’t said a thousand times over cups of coffee and blueprints and glowing computer screens. There was nothing more to do but listen to the traffic reports.

They had planned this job way in advance, though maybe it’s wrong to say that they’d planned it at all. The man with the idea was three thousand miles west sitting by his phone in Seattle and waiting to make a call. He was the jugmarker. Most robberies are lone-wolf operations that never get off the ground. A couple of crackheads try to knock down a bank and end locked up for the duration. A job with a jugmarker isn’t one of those. It is the kind of job you hear about once on the evening news and it never comes up again. The kind that goes off right and stays right. This was a job with strict plans, timing and endgame—a jugmarker’s heist from beginning to end. The man with the plan knew everything and called all the shots. Ribbons and Moreno didn’t like to say his name. Nobody did.

Bad luck.

Moreno and Ribbons weren’t dumb, though. They knew the patterns of the security cameras. They knew the armored truck inside and out. They knew the drivers’ names, the casino managers’ names, their habits, their records, their phone numbers, their girlfriends. They knew things they wouldn’t even need, because that was part of the process. There were a million things that could go wrong. The idea was to control the chaos, not step right into it. Now it was all down to the traffic reports.

After twenty minutes, Ribbons’s phone rang. A sharp, crisp chirp, repeated twice over. A specific ringtone for a specific number. He didn’t have to answer it. Both men knew what it meant. They exchanged glances. Ribbons sent the call to voice mail, put the drugs back in the glove box, and looked at his watch a third and final time. Two minutes to six in the morning.

The two-minute countdown had started.

Ribbons took a high-fiber cotton balaclava out of the glove box. He put the ski mask on and fitted it until the fabric was snug around his face. Moreno followed slowly with his own. Ribbons connected the wires under the dash and powered up the engine. On the floorboards was a KDH tactical-assault vest with level-four ballistic plates designed to stop rifle rounds from insurgent assault weapons fifty feet away. Ribbons had to wear one. He was the point man. His stomach hung out beneath. Under a blanket in the backseat was a Remington Model 700 hunting rifle loaded with five rounds, fitted with a red-dot sight and modified with an eight-and-a-half-inch AWC Thundertrap silencer—Moreno’s weapon. Next to it was a fully automatic Kalashnikov, Type 56, with three mags of 120-grain, full-metal-jacket, boat-tail hunting rounds, thirty in each. Ribbons took the AK and loaded a mag into the receiver, pulled back the cocking lever, turned to Moreno and asked—

“Are you as ready for this as I am?”

“I’m ready,” he said.

Again they were silent. The parking-garage lights flickered, then
turned off—no need for lights after sunrise. Their Dodge Spirit was covered in rot-brown rust stains. Right in front of them, visible across the street, was the casino’s side entrance where the truck would be. The rain streaks on the windshield looked like a kaleidoscope to Ribbons’s eyes.

Ninety seconds before the truck was supposed to arrive, Moreno got out of the car and took his position facing the street, behind a roadblock. The salt air had eaten the concrete down to the steel rebars. He looked up at the security cameras. They were shifted away. Perfect timing. Casino security’s tight enough to have cameras in the parking lot, just not quite tight enough. Moreno had mapped out the camera blind spots and tested them weeks ago. Nobody really cares what goes on in the parking lot at six in the morning. Moreno steadied the forearm of his rifle on the concrete block. He flipped the lens cap off his sight, pulled back the lever and locked in the first round.

Then Ribbons got out. He hustled while the cameras were still shifted away and hid behind the next pillar, in another blind spot. He started breathing deeply and quickly to loosen himself up so he’d be ready to run. The Kalashnikov seemed tiny in his massive hands. He held it close to his chest. He was beginning to feel sick. That old familiar feeling crept into his stomach, like it always did. Nerves. Not as bad as Moreno’s nerves, he thought, but still there, every time.

Sixty seconds.

Ribbons counted down the seconds in his head. The timing was very important. They were under strict orders not to move until the exact moment. The sweat made the inside of his gloves slick. It is harder to shoot precisely in latex gloves, but he was also under orders to keep them on until the end of the day. He was as still as the Buddha behind his pillar, even though it was a little too small for him. He didn’t even have enough space to pull back his jacket and look at his watch. Instead he concentrated on breathing, in and out, in and out. Seconds ticked away in his head. Water fell in drops off the concrete overhead.

At exactly six a.m., the Atlantic Armored truck slid through the green light at the corner and turned down the street. Both the driver and the guard wore brown uniforms. The truck was ten feet tall and weighed close to three tons. It was white, with the Atlantic Armored logo painted on both sides. It turned in the casino’s loading zone and came to a slow, rolling stop under the Regency sign. Ribbons could barely hear a thing over the sound of his own hurried breath.

Armored cars are never easy. They’re intimidating machines. It’s not just the obvious things, like the three inches of bullet-resistant NIJ-tested armor, or the tires reinforced with forty-five layers of DuPont Kevlar, or the windows made of a transparent sort of polycarbonate capable of stopping a whole clip of ten-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. No, all that’s obvious. The more dangerous things about an armored car involve the stuff on the inside. The guards, for example, are trained guys with guns. The inside of the truck’s got cameras that record everything that happens in there. There are sixteen gun ports, so the guys on the inside can shoot the guys on the outside. And to top it all off, there are magnetic plates in the strongboxes. If the loot is ever taken off the plate, a timer starts going. If the timer ever runs out, little ink packs in the money explode and ruin the prize. But to a jugmarker and a team with a plan, all those worrisome features fall by the wayside. There is always a weakness. In this case, there were two. The first is obvious: nothing stays inside an armored car forever. Wait for the guys to get out, and all the armor and cameras and magnetic plates mean nothing. The second requires a little more thought, however. The second requires much more cruelty.

Kill the guards, and the cash can be yours.

There were two of them, both in the front cab. One driver and one money handler, with a couple of years of experience between them, or so the research said. One had a family, the other didn’t. Once the truck had come to a stop, they’d got out. As soon as they closed the doors, a guy in a cheap black suit came out through the casino entrance to meet them. He was balding and had a name badge over his lapel. He was the
casino vault manager. Middle forties, cleanest record a guy could have. Not even a parking ticket. He took a key out of his pocket and handed it to the money handler. Of course, even with his clean record, he was never allowed in the truck itself. Not once in ten years. The uniforms would handle it out here, and he would handle it back in the cage. He waited on the sidewalk and rubbed his hands together.

Thirty seconds.

The driver took another key off his belt and handed it to the handler, who cracked the lock on the back of the truck and climbed in. Back there was a magnetic-plated strongbox built into the side wall of the vehicle and covered with a further layer of bulletproof ceramic armor. His key fit into one of the two locks, and the vault manager’s key fit into the other. Nobody had ever robbed an Atlantic Armored truck before. Their service was top of the line, courtesy of paranoid bankers and hotel service accounts worth countless times more than a whole fleet of armored trucks. Security was a big deal in this town. The item in question was a twelve-kilo block of vacuum-packed hundred-dollar bills, in the new style with the shiny metal security stripes right down the middle. The block was subdivided into hundred-bill stacks called
straps
, because of the mustard-colored paper strap banding each pile together for easy counting. Each strap was worth ten thousand U.S. dollars. There were 122 straps in the twelve-kilo block, or $1,220,000, compressed to the size of a large suitcase. The handler slid the money off the magnetic plate. There was a blue Kevlar bag in a drawer opposite. He fitted the stacked cash in the bag, then fitted the bag onto a small carrying trolley hooked into the wall. He put on a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and pushed the trolley off onto the pavement. It was large and awkward, so he had to maneuver it.

Ten seconds.

As soon as the handler got out of the truck, the driver drew a Glock 19 from his holster and held it low beside his hip, which was standard procedure for a delivery like this. He looked bored. This was his first delivery of the day and there would be ten more like it, back and forth
to various casinos at different times throughout his shift. He adjusted his grip on the gun and kept his finger off the trigger. The handler locked the truck and gave the casino’s key back to the vault manager, who attached it to his belt. The driver scanned the parking garage, then turned back, took two steps toward the casino doors and gestured for the other two to follow with the money.

Time’s up. Ribbons gave the signal.

Moreno’s rifle bucked gently in his arms. The shot wasn’t silent but muffled, like a nail gun firing up close. The bullet hit the driver’s head just below the hairline and behind the ear. It went right through his head and exited through the nose. Blood and brain matter painted the sidewalk. Moreno didn’t wait to see the body fall. At this distance, he knew where the bullets would go. He worked the bolt and the cartridge flew out. It took him a fraction of a second to switch targets, as if he’d been doing this his entire life. The vault manager was closest, so he was next. The bullet hit him in the sternum and tore through his heart. The third target was already on the move.

The money handler threw himself toward the armored truck. He stumbled on the sidewalk, then hit the pavement and grabbed for the Glock in his holster. Moreno led him through the sight. He took a bead and squeezed the trigger. The bullet missed by a foot. The guard scrambled for cover. Moreno gave Ribbons a hand motion. No chance he’d get the shot from this angle.

Ribbons emerged from his blind spot and raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder. He pissed bullets, unsuppressed, full-automatic. The gunshots broke the morning silence like a jackhammer in the middle of the night. The glass casino doors shattered as one long, thirty-round burst of ammunition poured from the barrel of his gun. It was the law of large numbers for hitting the third guy. Most of the bullets missed, but one didn’t. A bullet caught the handler in the spine, below the heart. He twisted on the pavement from the hit. Inside the casino, people started screaming.

Ribbons hopped over the concrete barrier between the parking garage and the street and jogged toward the armored truck. He dropped his clip, whipped out another and charged it. There was no traffic in either direction. Too early for that. He held the rifle out one-handed, in case somebody else was waiting to come out from the casino and snatch the money first. He stooped down, never taking his eyes off the doors, and used his free hand to try to unhitch the bag, which was fastened to the trolley with big easy nylon buckles. Ribbons hadn’t considered, however, how hard it would be to get them undone with one hand, in a latex glove, on a quarter gram of meth, in the July heat. His hand was shaking.

Moreno watched the street through his sight.
Come on, come on, come on
.

Then the alarm went.

It was a loud klaxon with flashers from inside the lobby, meant for fires and earthquakes. Ribbons flinched, then sprayed a burst through the doors to discourage anybody from coming out. The rifle’s kickback forced his arm up and sent bullets through some windows in the casino’s hotel tower and took out the
R
in the neon Regency sign. His brass shell casings poured out and tinkled on the sidewalk. He shouted. The recoil nearly broke his hand. When he regained control of the Kalashnikov, he kicked the bag to the pavement in frustration. Screw it. He pointed the gun at the last nylon buckle and blew it free.

The money handler gurgled from where he lay on his back a few feet away. His eyes followed Ribbons. Blood frothed up from his mouth and pooled around his face like a halo. Ribbons picked the bag up by the broken strap and slung it over his shoulder. When he passed the dying guard, he looked down at him, lowered the rifle and put a burst of bullets through his head.

Police sirens were audible in the distance, drawn to the gunfire. Eight blocks away, by the sound of it. Thirty-second response time starting now. Ribbons ran as quickly as he could back to the parking
garage. He was shaking, even despite the handful of barbiturates he’d swallowed. His eyes were as wild as some savage warrior’s. There was still no traffic. The run was easy.