Ghostman (25 page)

A scatter is more than just a hiding place, you see. It’s where a guy gets his head right before the robbery. Everybody has a different approach. Some guys are so stressed they get sick beforehand. They’ll spend the whole night coughing and puking and swearing to god they’ll never pull another job, but when they wake up the next morning, all of a sudden they’re as calm as can be. Some guys try to work themselves into a frenzy. They spend the whole night thinking about their abusive dads or their unfaithful ex-wives or some other thing that gets them mad. That way when the job starts, they’re so angry they don’t care if they have to hurt someone to get what they want. Some guys fill whole notebooks with lists of stuff they’re going to buy, so their greed takes over. Some guys meditate. The result’s always the same. Everybody finds a way to deal with the fear, so when they show up on the job they’re ready to work. The scatter is as much a mental safeguard as it is a physical one.

Over those six days I translated Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
onto a yellow legal pad. When I was done I read my translation over a few times. It was forced and inelegant. I put my lighter to the corner of the notebook and watched as the fire consumed the words, then put the smoldering ashes in the wastebasket. My translations never flowed as well as I wanted them to. As hard as I tried, I could never make the words feel like my
own. They lived only in the moment that I translated them, and died as soon as I put them on the page.

I got a text message from Marcus on the sixth day.
Just a setback
, it said.
Be ready to go on Friday
.

I remember feeling relieved. I was embarrassed about what had happened out there in the Genting Highlands, and to hear the heist was still on made me feel better about it. I’d done the right thing, I told myself. And I stand by that. Killing Harrison was the right thing to do.

But that wasn’t my mistake.

My mistake was failing to make sure he was dead.

38

ATLANTIC CITY

The wrecked Mercedes wasn’t much to look at—just a pile of steaming metal with the roof battered a few feet into the surf. The rear wheels spun lazily in the air at awkward angles. If it weren’t for the sharp, acrid smell of motor oil and burned rubber, it would’ve been hard to tell how long the car had been there. It was already beginning to look like another feature of the beach. The thin strip of sand between the road and the surf was littered with massive rocks and other inhospitable detritus. Coke bottles. Cigarette packs. Plastic bags. The waves crashed up against the wrecked car and sent bits of white froth and sea trash flying.

I put a hand over my eyes to block the glare off the ocean and took in the view, following the thin line of the horizon from the piers of the distant Boardwalk to the foggy shore farther north. Nobody had walked along this beach in a very long time. I could taste the salt from the ocean spray. If I wanted to, I could just drive off. If the driver didn’t come to, it might be days before somebody stumbled across this wreck.

But the guy in the Mercedes did come to. And he started screaming.

It wasn’t what you’d imagine, though. He didn’t have enough air for that. The sound he made was more like a desperate gurgle. Because the car had landed upside down, the man’s head was jammed into the surf and every new wave that came through flooded the interior. He was screaming because he couldn’t breathe. If I left him like that, he’d drown in a matter of minutes.

I walked slowly down the hill and waded into the water. The driver’s door was stuck pretty bad, so I had to use my foot for leverage. I planted one foot firmly in the sand and tugged on the handle. The door came about halfway open before it got stuck in the sand.

The man was barely conscious. He was strapped in upside down and his safety belt kept him from moving his head clear of the water. I reached over him through the door and unfastened the belt. He fell forward over the steering wheel and started flailing like a hooked fish. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled his head out of the water. Blood was running down his face from a cut in his left eye. Some glass had shattered and sliced him up pretty good. I think his ankle was broken, too, because it was wedged unnaturally between the accelerator and the foot well. I got a better grip and dragged him out through the surf onto the beach.

That’s when I saw the gun.

He had a 9mm Beretta with a silencer under his jacket. As soon as I let him go, he went for it. He brought his arm up in a wide arc and pulled on the butt protruding from his shoulder holster. He had a grip on it, but couldn’t pull the gun out. The six-inch silencer made it just a little too long and awkward to draw while lying on his back.

I hit him with both fists in the solar plexus. His arms turned to jelly as he gasped and doubled over. The gun fell out then, but I kicked it away. He scrambled after it, so I stomped on his broken ankle.

His scream was primal.

I walked around him, picked up the Beretta out of the sand, pointed
it near his face and fired off a round. The bullet made a sound like a whip crack and the gun made a low
cha-chunk
as the cocking slide opened the breach and ejected the spent brass.

The man stopped fighting. He fell onto his back again, writhing in pain. He coughed and coughed until salt water and bloody spit bubbled out of his mouth and he could breathe again. He couldn’t speak, though. A shard of broken glass must have cut his tongue right down the center. I could see the frothy blood trickle from the corner of his mouth and up from his lips.

The Wolf’s man was a big white guy with plain looks. He didn’t look like a tough guy. He was wearing a leather jacket, sure, but his pale baby-blue eyes and round face belonged to a man who was soft on the inside. He looked more like a guy on vacation than a member of a vicious drug gang. I grabbed him by the collar but his jacket ripped in half. Under the expensive leather were prison tattoos. Faded blue-and-black markings. He was covered with gang tags he’d picked up for the price of blood in Marienville or Bayside or someplace. On his left shoulder was a black swastika no bigger from side to side than a silver dollar. Next to it was a bleeding heart with four tears bursting out. I gave up trying to move him and let him fall back against the sand.

We were silent for a second. The breeze came in off the ocean with the sound of seagulls. The Wolf’s man was crying blood. It soaked through his eyebrow down his cheek to his neck and spread through his shirt. He spat out a tooth and a wad of bloody phlegm.

“You know,” I said, “I love moments like this.”

He closed his eyes. I got down on my haunches next to him so we could have a talk. I grabbed his cheek and turned his face toward me. He might have been crying, but it was hard to tell. There was too much blood.

“You hear me?” I said. “I love moments like this. It’s all over your face. Right now you’re looking at me with more intensity than you’ve probably put into anything in your whole life. You’re fully inside this
moment, because you’re afraid I’m going to kill you. Do you know how rare that is for me? You’re not worrying about your credit-card statement or your mortgage or how many cigarettes you have left before you’ll have to buy a new pack. No. Right now every fiber of your being is focused on me and this gun.”

I tapped the end of the silencer against his chest. The man was breathing like a machine, practically hyperventilating. His one good eye was as wide open as could be and focused on my face like a laser. I don’t think he could stop looking at me if he tried.

I glanced at the wrecked car and then out over the ocean. The air smelled like salt water and gasoline. I breathed in through my nose, relishing it. It reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what. I let my breath out and looked back down at the Wolf’s man.

“I only have one question,” I said. “I think you know what it is.”

“Tracking device,” he said, the blood now gushing through his teeth. He started to reach into one of his pockets. When I saw he wasn’t going for another weapon, I let him. He pulled out a simple black cell phone that was still powered on. On the screen was a highlighted portion of a map with a blue arrow showing our exact location.

“Where’s the signal coming from?”

“You,” he said.

“Is it one of my phones?”

“They put a bug on you.”

I took the phone from his hands and moved it around. The location of the dot didn’t change. It must’ve been some sort of GPS tracer, which means the signal could have been coming from almost anything. The Wolf might have slipped it into my clothes or one of my cell phones. I’d seen GPS trackers as small as buttons before. The professional-grade trackers don’t even need their own power supply. They can run for weeks on a hearing-aid battery and track a location down to a point the size of an oversized armchair. I sighed and pointed the gun back at the man’s chest.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t particularly mind killing guys like you. I’ve done it before. But you’re going to get through this alive. Consider it my way of thanking you. You see, when I flew in yesterday I was afraid this job was going to be too easy. Before I got off the plane, I was worried that I’d find the heist money right away and I wouldn’t get to do anything fun in the process. It’s a good thing you guys showed up. Without you in particular, I never would’ve got to enjoy this moment. All the colors are a little brighter. The air tastes a little better. Even the sand feels good. There’s no drug out there that feels like this.”

I pressed the gun into his sternum with one hand and went through his pockets with the other. He had a black leather wallet in his left pants pocket. His driver’s license said his name was John Grimaldi. He was six feet tall and had an address out in Ventnor. He was just a little over thirty years old. The license had been issued a few years before. In the photo, he was almost handsome. I took the license and threw the wallet on his chest.

“Are they listening to me right now?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope they are,” I said. “Even if they aren’t, I hope you are, John. There’s a reason I’m telling you this. The Wolf is going to find you, after all. When he does, he’ll want to know what I said. I want you to tell him a few things, okay? I want you to make this clear to him: I don’t belong to anybody. I’m not Marcus’s man, and I won’t be his. I’m just here because I’ve spent the last six months staring at an empty wall in my apartment and waiting for something interesting to come along. This
is
interesting. I live for moments like this. So if the Wolf wants to stop losing his men one by one, he should leave me alone or make me another offer. This time, however, it had better be interesting.”

The man’s good eye stared up at me in terror. He nodded with desperate eagerness.

“I hope you remember that, John.” I said.

Then I took a look at my watch, pressed the end of the gun against his
knee and squeezed the trigger. The silencer made a thump that echoed out over the water. His eye fluttered for a second before he passed out from the pain. I picked up his phone, tossed it into the ocean and walked back up the hill to the Bentley, taking the pistol with me.

I looked at my watch. Eight a.m.

I had twenty-two hours to go.

39

I checked into a small motel at the edge of the city. The desk clerk barely looked at me. It was still only morning, long before any reasonable check-in time, when he handed me the key. It would do for a few hours of anonymous privacy.

After a couple of years in this profession, cheap motels are like your second home. You get used to certain things. The Gideon Bible’s always in the same place. The bedsheets all have the same quality. The rooms all have a piney, freshly scrubbed smell at first, but that soon fades into its natural, dirtier musk. This one smelled like ammonia. I took a long breath through my nose, closed the blinds and put the chain on the door. It felt like coming home.

Once I was sure I was alone, I took out my cell phones. It’s easy to check a cell phone for added GPS trackers. If it’s hardware, it’s easy to find. There isn’t a whole lot of extra space in there. If it’s software, it’s easy to turn off. Once the battery is out, it all turns off. First I scrolled through the menu interface to make sure that each phone’s built-in GPS transmitter was switched off. They all were. Then I cracked the phones open to see if they had been tampered with. One by one I removed the batteries, SIM cards, fractal antennae and digital-memory cards. Nothing
looked out of the ordinary, so I put them all together again. Once I was done, I lay back on the bed for a while and thought it over. They obviously weren’t tracking me that way. Huh.

I turned the shower on to make some noise. The water came up slowly from the pipes with a low whine. In the other room I turned on the television with the volume all the way up. I didn’t really think that their bug would have audio, but I didn’t want to run that risk. After what happened with Harrison in the Genting Highlands all those years ago, I’ve had nightmares about hidden microphones.

I went through my overnight bag and my clothes after that. It wouldn’t have taken much sleight-of-hand for one of the Wolf’s operators to slip a transmitter on me. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully combed over my body. I turned each of my pockets out. I emptied my bag and flipped through my copy of
Metamorphoses
. Nothing.

I gave myself a long hard look in the mirror. After two days with little food and no rest, I was actually beginning to feel as old as I looked. Jack Morton had seen a little too much action lately. It was time to change. I wiped the condensation off the mirror. My makeup was running in the heat.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower for a good long while. My arm had developed a string of bruises where Aleksei had struggled to free himself during our fight. They were turning black in the center already.

Once I toweled off, I got my makeup kit out and placed the ID card I’d taken off the man in the Mercedes in the corner of the bathroom mirror. I focused on his face for a while and tried to mimic his fearful yet confident expression. He had deep, sunken eyes and an empty, black-and-white pallor. Even though he lived in a beach town, he didn’t have the slightest hint of a tan. He looked lost, somehow.